Which 16:9 size is the GDM-FW900 closest to in terms of screen height?

As you probably know, the Fw900 has a diagonal viewable area of 22.5" instead of 24 because of the way CRT's are measured.

That being said, I looked and found that a 24" 16:9 lcd has a vertical viewing area of about 11.7" and the Fw900 has 12.1"

I'd guess that's the closest match. 27" is way taller.

Here is a good site for comparing various 16.9 sizes to various 4.3 sizes.
http://www.displaywars.com/

I just replaced my old 4x3 17 inch PC CRT that is 16.1 inches viewable with a 16x9 21.5 viewable LED backlit LCD PC monitor.

That site will give you the width and height and even produce a graphic showing you the size difference.

Check it out at http://www.displaywars.com/

Here is the difference between my old and new monitors
http://www.displaywars.com/16,1-inch-4x3-vs-21,5-inch-16x9
Edited by Super Eye - 9/14/12 at 4:11pm

Definitely a handy tool to have there! Bookmarking that site now...

Sony FW-900 is not a 16:9 ratio screen. It is in fact 16:10. If you use this screen with your Xbox 360 or any game made with 16:9 ratio, then you must adjust the screen in order to make borders on the top and bottom of the image in order to maintain proper ratio. If you do not do this, the image you see will be stretched when used with games at this ratio.

Well, technically, it's not exactly 16:10 either (482.1 x 308.2 mm ~ 64%), but close enough for government work as they say.

Now that you mention it, I think that is correct that the 360 will letterbox the image on a 16:10 display to a 16:9 format, resulting in a smaller vertical image than the actual screen height. I had forgotten about that, but that would only be an issue with Xbox-not PC. You could stretch it to fit perhaps, but I wouldn't do that. Just looks wonky.

Well, you'll want to go over vga to mitigate input lag. Here are the supported resolutions: http://hardware.teamxbox.com/reviews/xbox-360/40/Xbox-360-VGA-HD-AV-Cable/p1/
It looks like it has no problem supporting a 16:10 resolution so maybe it will show a full 16:10 image. Something tells me current 360 games only jive with two image formats though 4:3 and 16:9, if the image is to small you'll likely be able to cut the sides of the 16:9 image slightly to fill the 16:10 screen as you likely want to feed it the maximum vga res anyways which is in fact 16:9.

if you do go for a fw900 I hope it does everything you want it to without any of the issues you've had with the xbr 960, keep in mind Hp, Dell and Sun all sell rebranded versions of the Sony fw900 so if you can find them it might save you some coin over the Sony

EDIT: I somehow forgot that you want to completely mitigate scaling to solve your problem, meaning the most suitable resolution for you over vga has to have a 720 pixel vertical resolution.
There are a couple of games you just won't be able to do anything for because they run at 640p or 600p but that is the game designers fault, for the majority you may get even less lag than you had on your 480i or p screen because there should be no scaling at all.
Edited by Mik James - 9/16/12 at 10:09am

720p looked great on my FW900 and W900 using my 360, but the inability of the Xbox to output anything higher than 60hz made my eyes ache. Some people don't mind that too much, but I couldn't hack it. Not trying to discourage you from getting one, just a thought.

Actually, if you use 1680x1050, which is a 16:10 resolution, with your XBox 360, you will get borders at the top and bottom of the screen when playing your games. The rest of the interface will fill the screen when you are outside of your game, but it is impossible to play your games at that ratio in that resolution because the 360 will always and under every circumstance output borders with them. As I said, you can get around this with the FW-900 by stretching the vertical axe, but if you do this, you are stretching the image. You can also lose the right and left side, but that's a piss poor compromise.

There are no XBox 360 games which are designed with a 16:10 framebuffer. Similarly, although in reverse, if you happen to use any 4:3 resolution with the XBox 360, you will encounter many games which force the video into a letterboxed format--even when running at 640x480 or 480i or 480p.

There's also the fact that you would be scaling 720p up to a higher res via the 360's scaler a topic we have gone over for about 3 threads now
The 360 doesn't support 1680x1050 over VGA as far as I and the people who wrote the article I linked know and anything other than VGA would introduce input lag.
If your not planning to run 1280x720 to the fw900 over VGA you might as well keep the xbr 960.